Record: 37-33. Pace: 86-76. Change on 2012: +2.
Let's just review the Marlins this season. Coming in to tonight, their team line was .232/.289/.330, a .619 OPS which is close to 50 points worse the Cliff Pennington's career numbers. Not...
Record: 37-33. Pace: 86-76. Change on 2012: +2.
Let's just review the Marlins this season. Coming in to tonight, their team line was .232/.289/.330, a .619 OPS which is close to 50 points worse the Cliff Pennington's career numbers. Not to pick on Pennington of course, but he's a player whose value is almost entirely with his glove. And the Marlins have been significantly worse than that this year. No team in the league has had an OPS that low for over 40 years, since the 1972 Padres. They're bad. But they have Giancarlo Stanton., who had a career OPS+ of 140 before tonight's game. He is the epitome of the guy you don't let beat you. He's Barry Bonds on the 2001 Giants.
Tonight, for example, he was being "protected" in the line-up by the Marlins' clean-up hitter, Marcell Ozuna. Ozuna is a rookie who possesses exactly one career home-run in the majors, over his 162 at-bats there. Stanton is, literally, the only hitter in the Marlins line-up who poses a threat. This isn't second-guessing. You can ask Mrs. SnakePit, because before Stanton's second at-bat, I turned and said to her, "This guy scares me." The result was a loud, very long fly-ball to the warning track and a large lump in my throat. But the D-backs didn't learn. With the game on the line subsequently, they pitched to Stanton twice, and got burned both times, costing them this one.
You can kinda understand the first situation. Patrick Corbin had pitched brilliantly through the first five innings, not just keeping the Marlins off the board, but no-hitting them. The only base-runners he had allowed were Stanton, who reached on an error by Martin Prado in the first, and a two-out walk in the fourth. The no-hitter was finally broken up by Juan Pierre, with one out in the sixth, who slapped a bloop hit over the head of third-base and dumped it into left-field. One out later, Stanton was up, and Corbin fell behind 2-0. He did appear to hit his spot with the next pitch, based on where Montero was setting up, but Stanton still crushed it, over the D-backs bullpen in left. Tied game.
There's another proverb that seems relevant here. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. After a scoreless seventh and eighth innings, Corbin exited, having allowed two hits and one walk, striking out seven and throwing 106 pitches. The team turned to Heath Bell for the ninth, which is fairly standard practice: at home, you use your closer in the ninth of a tied game, and play for the win in the bottom of the inning. With one out, Stanton was up again. Bell got ahead of him with some nasty curves, but with a 1-2 count, left a fastball up - as 'hacks noted. apparently shaking off Montero - and Stanton, inevitably, crushed it the other way, over the fences in left-field.
Daniel Hudson made a spirited attempt to defend the decision on Twitter, saying "Sorry guys, two outs in the ninth, you NEVER put the go ahead run on base. Next guy hits a homer, you’re down 2. Then what?" Of course, as noted above, the odds of Ozuna hitting a home-run were so slim as to require some kind of advanced optical device to locate them. Frankly, knowing Stanton was certain to come up in the ninth, I'd have used Ziegler, off whom it's almost impossible for anyone to hit a home-run. If he walked or got one through the infield, you play no doubles defense, and it takes two hits to score him. The bottom of the Marlins order probably aren't going to do that.
Remarkably, the Marlins didn't just win despite not getting a hit with runners in scoring position, they didn't even have ONE PLATE-APPEARANCE with runners in scoring position. It's only the fourth time in franchise history we've lost such a game. It was also only the sixth time the Diamondbacks pitching staff have allowed three hits or fewer over nine innings of work, and still lost - the last occasion was in September 2008, when Jon Rauch allowed a go-ahead home-run to Corey Patterson in the 10th inning against Cincinnati, and we lost 2-1 to t